Conflicting Realities
by DarkPriestessofAssimbya
Summary: Vingettes from the point of view of each of the main characters in seven different movie versions of the story, exploring the similarities and differences between those movies' outlooks. Nine parts, eventually.
1. Count Dracula

**Count Dracula**

_Version One_

He understood nothing but dust and death and the smell of life – all else were mortal concepts, useless and not worth expending energy on. His castle had long since lost the last of the three when young Mr. Hutter came to it, smiling and filling the Count's hands with papers which he hadn't bothered to read. And, as though irresistibly drawn to the living blood in Hutter's veins, the Count came to his side as he slept, listening to his breath echoing throughout the empty halls of the castle.

But within the mortal substance of Hutter's mind, there were memories of a whole world beyond the Count's castle, a world full of living, breathing, laughing humans with bright red blood – a world that the Count had forgotten, alone with his rats. Memories of a woman (yet another thing that the Count had forgotten, women – with their soft skin and throats bared to his ratlike fangs), indescribably beautiful in Hutter's thoughts, her blood worth so much of his.

And the Count drew back, spared Hutter for a time, turned his ancient mind to thoughts of ships and oceans and the future (something he had not dared think about for so long, the _future!)_, and the left bumbling human to his own devices.

The Count knew, somewhere in his dust filled mind, that when he went to Hutter's city of humanity, he would bring with him death in a thousand forms – death of plague, death of blood loss, death of despair. He knew that, in going there, he would be destroying the world that he so longed to forever disappear into. But he didn't care, not really. There would be other cities in the coming millennia, other human hearts. This would not be the last he saw of the world.

_Version Two_

It wasn't as though he didn't know how to interact with humans. There was an art to it, and one he had cultivated well. A smile was the way to deal with the Englishmen, a smile coupled with expensive, formal clothing and an apology for his poor English – his English wasn't poor at all, in fact, but the apology seemed to make them forgive his occasional silences and, often, become more inclined to trust him. And, with their trust partly won, he was soon invited from their theaters to their parlors and, inevitably, to their bedchambers.

To beautiful frail women with rounded limbs, who bared their necks after even the slightest touch of his power on their minds. The women on England were all beautiful, from the flower sellers to the high ladies decked out in jewels in a private box at the ballet. He would bring a few of them home with him when he was done with the bright electric light of England, pack them inside his extra coffins like additional luggage, souvenirs from his trip. Then, in the leisure of his ancient home, he would do with them as he wished, freed then from the need for seduction and for human affectations, which, while an amusing novelty occasionally, hardly were something that he could maintain forever.

He loved England, though, despite the fact that he never intended to stay there forever. Glittering England, come now into an era of such breathtaking sophistication that he had to marvel at it. He had visited England before, over the centuries – he had seen the reign of Queen Elizabeth, had been presented at her court – but no other era could match this one. And how glorious it was to be a part of it, even if he stood in the shadows so that the light did not reflect off his pale skin.

The future could only get more glorious, he was sure, with more bright lights so that he could imagine what the sunlight might look like.

_Version Three_

He had spent centuries abandoned to savagery, his castle fallen into ruin, his victims bound with shreds of moth eaten curtains rather than his mental control, the blood stains on the stone floors washed off only by the rain that came through the gaps in the roof. He paid no heed to any of it, living like the wolves that surrounded him, snarling more than he spoke.

But eventually he remembered the aristocratic blood in his veins, and saw the remnants of beauty in the castle, and decided that something needed to change.

He hired architects, and craftsmen of all varieties and, over decades, he recreated his world. The craftsmen and architects of that century did things differently from what he remembered – they added embellishments everywhere, graceful, ornate carvings the likes of which he had never seen before, stained glass windows with more vivid colors that those in any church he had seen before, tapestries of garish reds and purples and greens. But he didn't object, as he knew there was much he had forgotten in his feral centuries and perhaps all this was the most tasteful way to do things.

He had all his books still, though some of them had half decayed, wearing away year by year. The craftsmen and architects didn't know what to do about those, placing them haphazardly on the new bookshelves they bought for him. When the Count asked them what he ought to do with all the books, one of the architects advised him to hire a librarian.

And so he did. He sent out letters to British academics, though it took him a bit of time to remember which hand he ought to write with, and although most of them seemed loath to travel all the way to Transylvania to work for a reclusive Count with handwriting as erratic as the web of a blind spider, one of them, a young man by the name of Jonathan Harker, accepted the position.

The Count had to take Jonathan's letter away from Elena, his new bride, who pored over it as though it held the key to a great secret that could save her. He held her by the shoulders with a grip strong enough to bruise, saying, his voice hoarse from disuse, "You will not speak to him, do you understand?" And she nodded, shaking in his grip. He believed her.

Jonathan came, and the Count tried to understand him, though there was an odd cadence to his voice, one telling of suppressed secrets.

By the time the Count realized that Jonathan was there to destroy him, it would be too late for Elena, and too late for the Count's attempt at humanity. He would have to go to England.

_Version Four_

He had never been able to create another of his kind. Of all the dark gypsy girls he brought into his white washed castle, flinching from his long nails and dark lidded eyes, not one of them lived, no matter how much of his ancient blood he forced into their slack mouths. When their veins were emptied, they always died.

He read, in books written about his kind by mortals, something about coming willingly to undeath. He thought perhaps that was true, for he remembered his Maker, ancient and wishing for death, beckoning him with a long fingered hand and he, naïve and lonely in the castle where his family had long since died, coming to his side. He remembered his Maker, whose name never knew, whispering to him about how, drinking his blood, he felt as though the Count's mortality was coming into him, how he was passing on the curse and blessing on undeath to the Count, leaving him free to die.

That wasn't what happened. The Count remembered awakening the next day, his hands instinctively folded over his chest as he had always done even in childhood, and hearing the tortured screams of his Maker, which sent even the rats running. "I gave you all my blood!" he screamed to the Count, as though there was something he could do about it, "How can I still be living?"

The Count had no answer, and his Maker left then, never to return.

And so, when he met beautiful, dark haired Lucy, he asked her to come willingly to his side, to be his ally. She didn't flinch at his ugliness, but neither did she come to him, speaking resolute words about her love for Jonathan, even in his madness.

That only made him love her more. He wanted her at his side, to stave off his loneliness, to whisper the gentle words in his ear that she had whispered to Jonathan. He would not seek death as his Maker had, if only he had her.

Never had he wanted something that much before.

_Version Five_

He loved them, in his fashion. He loved twisting their pretty, fragile wills to his, loved them whether they struggled or writhed, screamed or moaned. Overt, excessive, garish violence was not his style – his was to grasp a wrist a little too tightly, perhaps leave bruises that would go nicely with a pale blue dress, but not the sort that one would notice until afterwards. He loved surrounding a woman with mist both within and without, making it so that she couldn't tell whether she hated or loved him. The confusion, the ambiguity was the most delightful part of it all.

Even better with a woman, like beautiful, clever Lucy Seward, had a life to be stolen from. Mina Van Helsing was delightful, especially considering the identity of her father, but he was the one of the few in the world who would miss her. Lucy had a loving fiancée in the Count's own solicitor, Jonathan Harker, and she cared for him so much that wept with guilt for leaving him even beside the Count in his coffin. He loved that, loved telling her that she wouldn't be allowed to return to Jonathan and that she really didn't want to, loved Lucy looking at him with love and loathing.

It was a shame that Mina had to die, but she was a frail thing, succumbing to his hypnosis without hesitation. She would never have survived her first century, and perhaps it was better that she die sooner rather than later. He had loved her, and had mourned for her, but one lost many such loves in immortality, and he was used to it.

But Lucy…Lucy he would not lose. Lucy he would take home to his other brides, waiting patiently for him, and she would smile that pretty uncertain smile of hers and hold out her hand for them to shake. Lucy would be all right.

_Version Six_

It wasn't true that he spent his eternal lifetime in search of her. One couldn't live that way, not really, and he didn't believe, deep in his unbeating heart, that he would find her again.

He didn't know if he minded, after four centuries without her. Immortality suited him, the pure glorious excess of it, blood and sex in equal measures. His three brides were not replacements for Elisabeta, and he didn't mind, for they were each beautiful in ways that Elisabeta had not been, and he could never imagine Elisabeta they way they were, mouths smeared with garish red blood, heads thrown back in the ecstasy of violence.

He had read about England, though he had never left Romania. It was a Protestant country in that century, he read – logical and modest and chaste. Reading that, the Count laughed out loud, the hollow sound echoing over the stone walls of the castle. A nation full of repressed humans, probably, men buttoned into waistcoats and women laced into corsets. A nation just waiting to be corrupted by his heathenism, bed sheets waiting to be stained with blood, men and women who would gasp at his touch, they were so starved for such things in their restricted lives.

He wasn't sure quite whether he wanted to go there – he felt safe in the word he had created for himself, free from crucifixes and holy water and the danger of sunlight. Venturing out into a distrustful world filled with all those things seemed an unpleasant possibility. But the possible wonders of the new nation of England spread before him…those were perhaps too much to ignore.

So he tried an experiment. He looked into buying a property near London, and had a British solicitor come to go over the paperwork with him. The first was weak minded, and went mad quickly – he had to leave without completing the transaction, and the Count sent a complaint to his employer. But the second, a young man named Jonathan Harker, was handsome and wonderfully repressed – a delight to corrupt, his and his bride's hands bringing Jonathan the sort of pleasure that he would likely consider sinful.

Even that might not even been enough to move him to go to England – he could have kept Jonathan in his castle for years before killing him at his leisure and thought nothing more of the country from which he came. But, in his bags, Jonathan had a picture of a woman – his fiancée – who looked just like the Count's Elisabeta.

He didn't know, or even really care if she was actually his wife from centuries past. It would be enough to pretend she was.

_Version Seven_

They were all idiots, mortals. Whether they wanted to worship him, or hunt him, or use him for his immortal blood, they always remained idiots, not worthy of his attention or respect. Worthless, except for the blood in their veins. This didn't mean that he always hated them, although he often did. Sometimes their idiocy was merely amusing, like a small child who doesn't grasp some simple fact of life.

So it was with young Mina, and her fiancée, Jonathan. They were cut of the same cloth, the two of them – if he had not killed Jonathan, they would have lived quite content lives together, the Count thought. They were good people, whatever that really meant. They both amused him – Jonathan had, with his ever earnest attempts at salesmanship, and now Mina did as well, quietly mourning her fiancée and friend, and now naively going to him for comfort. She was won over so easily, weakened as she was by sorrow and loneliness. Betraying her trust, as he had betrayed Jonathan's, would be enjoyable, though at the moment he would prefer to break open the heads of Singleton and Arthur Holmwood on their own damned altar.

For those fools didn't have the sort of endearing, harmless idiocy of the Harker couple. No, they presumed to meddle in things beyond their comprehension, thinking that, by placing a few useless trinkets on an altar, they gained the right to control him. They would never defeat him, of course, that was not a fear of his – though, if things got too troublesome, he might make them think that they did, for he preferred not to spend a decade hunted like an animal – but it was all so tiresome, so irritating. Like a colony of termites making their home under his house – time consuming to obliterate.

But obliterate them he would, and then he'd have the nation of England to wander through, dark and new and unexplored.


	2. Jonathan

**Jonathan**

_Version One_

He loved the world. He loved that it stretched out so far, almost beyond his comprehension, beyond the limits of even the maps his employer, Knock, hung all over the walls. He loved Ellen, and loved the world because she was part of it. He loved their little house, their new kittens, the little ways he could get Ellen to smile.

When he first set out to see Count Orlock, he loved all that too. He loved the trains he had to take, the interesting people he met on them. He loved the peasant-folk, the women with their aprons embroidered in heavy, bright thread and the men in their strange, exotic clothing. He loved the strange book on found on some local superstition called 'nosferatu'. He loved imaging telling Ellen about all of it.

But, when he met Count Orlock, he couldn't find anything to love in him. He tried to find something – his decorating style, perhaps? Or the way he seemed to become so immersed in the incomprehensible documents sent to him by Knock? But all of it seemed eerie and frightening, not fascinating, and Thomas wanted nothing more to than to leave that silent, dusty castle and go home to Ellen, where sunshine came through their windows and people smiled.

It felt as though, in Count Orlock's castle, he was slowly being suffocated, death clogging his mouth and nose till he became one with it all, with death and dust and silence.

He wasn't normally partial to such morbid thoughts. Ellen was, often, and he had to coax her out of them, bringing her to a garden or to the seaside, showing her how beautiful life was so that she didn't have to think about death. But something about Count Orlock, and about his castle, made such thoughts seem natural, and, indeed, unavoidable. He didn't know what it could possibly be, and he didn't want to know. He had the terrible feeling that such knowledge could spoil his vision of the world forever.

_Version Two_

Sometimes he didn't understand Mina. She lapsed into silence sometimes when they were together, as though she was thinking of another world that John couldn't even imagine. He tried to read the same books she read and talk to her closest friend, Lucy, in the hopes that such things would give him sort of insight into her mind, but she remained as enigmatic to him as before.

This didn't stop him from loving her, of course. Perhaps he first fell in love with her because he couldn't understand her, because there seemed to be more to her than the rest of the simpering young women he met. And he made his best efforts to get her to like him, and they seemed to work, for she smiled at him so often and blushed and kissed him back when he kissed her, and told him that she loved him. She had accepted his proposal, and seemed delighted enough to marry him. But, if he didn't understand her, couldn't those all just as easily be false signs, insincere as imagined dreams?

He went with her and her friend Lucy and her father Dr. Seward to the ballet one evening. Mina was happy that night (she told John that it was wonderful to be with everyone she cared about all at once), laughing at John's jokes, fascinated with the ballet. And she looked beautiful as well, dressed in the jewelry that she wore only rarely, her short hair unendurably charming to John's eyes.

But that Count was there, the foreign one from that Eastern country – what was it? Hungary? Romania? Transylvania? No, that last one wasn't a country, was it – and he spoiled all of Mina's good mood, what with Lucy watching him so closely and such. Mina told him later, when the Count was coming to visit them, that the foreign nobleman seemed odd to her, as though there was something they didn't know about him. John laughed at that, and kissed her cheek and told her that she was being silly.

John had never been a superstitious man, or even a religious one, really. He went to church often enough, of course, and the night before he proposed to Mina he sent up a quick prayer to God and all the saints he could think of (his parents hadn't condoned such things, calling it idolatry, but John's Irish nurse had told him stories about Saint Catherine and such, and something about all that stayed with him), but he wasn't about to go around with a crucifix or anything like that. So, when Professor Van Helsing told him that vampires were real and that the Count was one, he was baffled.

Perhaps, he thought, Mina had always been thinking about some world beyond his comprehension. Perhaps that world had always existed, all around him, but for some reason – blindness, or lack of imagination, probably – he just never saw it.

Well, he would have to start seeing it quickly. He wasn't going to lose Mina to some monster with a Hungarian accent.

_Version Three_

He had gone to school with Abraham. No, not university – their fields of interest had been so different by that point. But when they were young boys, still in grade school, they went together. Those days, they told one another everything, and, as some childhood friendships do, this one remained strong, out of habit or some significant, and they continued to tell one another everything even when they were going to universities quite a distance away and needed to take the train to meet and have tea together.

This meant that Abraham heard all about Jonathan's youthful attraction to the soon-to-be school teacher Mina Murray, and then about his blossoming romance with Mina's younger friend, Lucy Holmwood. It also meant that Jonathan heard all about Abraham's research into various supernatural phenomena, and then his more specific research on vampires, and then his final, horrifying discoveries on Count Dracula.

"I've read from the records of those who have visited the village nearby his castle that the young people there, especially the women, regularly disappear from their homes to be returned weeks later, dead and sometimes tortured," Abraham said as he added milk to his tea, his voice as calm and professional as it always was when speaking about his research, though Jonathan could see from the tremor in the hand that lifted the milk jug that this troubled even the calm scientist Abraham had become.

"Oh, god," Jonathan said softly, "that's awful. It's the first time you've actually been able to find a documented case of these creatures, isn't it?"

Abraham nodded. "There have been leads in other places, but this is the first one that's come to anything. And even with this one, I wasn't sure that he was anything but a bit of local folklore until he suddenly started hiring architects from all over Europe." He gave Jonathan a wry smile. "It seems that he has the intention of fixing up that castle of his."

Jonathan smiled back, but was really quite worried. He knew Abraham's sometimes frightening dedication to his work. If he thought it necessary, Abraham would probably actually go to that castle in Transylvania, regardless of his own safety. Jonathan didn't think he could bear to imagine Abraham lying dead in some ancient ruined castle, murdered by a hideous beast.

"He's looking for a librarian, I hear. A British one."

Jonathan nearly dropped his teacup. It was obvious, even though Abraham wouldn't meet his eyes, what the other man was suggesting. He thought of his pretty fiancée, Lucy, and his promising career as a librarian right there in London, and the highly likely possibility that, if he agreed what Abraham was suggesting, he would quite soon be lying dead in an isolated castle in the Carpathian Mountains. But then he thought again of Abraham dead in such a place, and of all the terrible things this Count Dracula must still be doing, and how much all this mattered to his friend.

He would go.

_Version Four_

The world looked different. Tilted perhaps, or maybe just focused differently, like closing one eye and trying to see through only the other. He remembered, in the vague remnants of his memory, that once things hadn't seemed quite like this, but he didn't know when that time was, or whether it had merely been in his imagination.

He had forgotten things too, he knew that. Though, really, he never knew that he had forgotten something until he realized that there was something he couldn't do any longer, like fastening buttons, or someone spoke to him and expected him to remember them.

The Lady, especially. She with the beautiful long dark hair, straight and smooth and always making him want to run his fingers through it. She who sat beside him and whispered things to him in a soft voice, things he could never quite remember. She wept sometimes when she looked at him, and he wanted to tell her not to be sad, that everything would be all right, but when he tried to, she just cried more.

He did remember the Master, though, but he didn't think the Master remembered him, which was strange – with everyone else, it was the other way around. But once the Master came into the house – going to see the Lady, Jonathan thought – and Jonathan called out to him but the Master didn't turn around, just as if he couldn't hear Jonathan.

Jonathan understood the Master, though, in many ways that he could never have articulated. And he knew that the Master wasn't the type to notice mistakes like Jonathan, who was slowly becoming undead. The Master had decided to forget Jonathan, and so he had. Simply and easily.

Jonathan wondered sometimes if that was what he had done, and now he just had forgotten the forgetting. He didn't think so, though, somehow.

_Version Five_

If he was being perfectly honest with himself, he didn't know whether or not she had betrayed him. Professor Van Helsing talked of a vampire's powers of hypnosis, their abilities to destroy the will of their victims, and Jonathan would like to think that that was what had happened to Lucy, that she only fought him, and tried to go back to the Count, because her will was gone and he had bewitched her. That was an easy explanation; that made it a simple matter to rush off to Carfax Abbey with Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing, holding crucifixes and stakes, determined to destroy this evil corruption forever.

But was it true? Remembering Lucy dancing with the Count at that dinner party, and the way she listened so carefully to his every word on that same evening, Jonathan wasn't sure. Lucy had always talked about wanting things beyond what Whitby offered, about how narrow their view of the world was, and Jonathan had told her, quite honestly, that he shared her feelings in all that, that if and when they got married they would go off around Europe together in Jonathan's new car, having all the adventures their hearts could desire, but was that enough for her? Had this foreign Count with his subtle accent and talk of exotic ancestry been too much of an adventure for her to resist?

She was no longer the woman that he knew, he told himself over and over, and that was a comfort, for he could say then that she had been twisted beyond recognition by the Count's powers. But when he went to her room in her father's asylum, even in her words on the Count's power she had clearly been Lucy Seward, if not the same Lucy Seward that he had fallen in love with.

Perhaps, then, she hadn't been changed by some form of hypnosis, but merely normally, the way anyone can be changed. There had been despair in her words in the asylum, despair and a hopelessness that he had never seen in her before. When Lucy had gone to Carfax Abbey for dinner, when Jonathan had found her unconscious in her bed…what had happened to her? What had the Count done, and said that made her think that his powers were so great that none of them could escape?

Jonathan didn't know. But, if he was ever to love Lucy again, he had to be able to imagine.

_Version Six_

They barely spoke now, after everything. It was true that Jonathan had never really been a talkative sort, tending to leave most of the conversation to Mina, who certainly was, but now the silences over breakfast and dinner were utterly deafening. Neither of them even _looked _at one another.

It wasn't as though they could in good conscience be angry with one another, at least not anymore than they could be angry with themselves. But the constant combination of guilt and anger between them now made the air thick with secrets that they both knew.

Jonathan wasn't an idiot. He knew that there had been more between Mina and the Count than what she had told all of them, and that something important had passed between them when Mina went with his broken body into that chapel.

Mina knew too, about the Count and Jonathan and the Count's brides, Jonathan was sure of that. He had told her, after all, that she could read his journal if she wanted to, and though she had never told him that she had, she never told them that she hadn't, either. Jonathan didn't know which of the two of them had committed the worse crime; Jonathan had betrayed Mina purely for physical pleasure, and Mina had, Jonathan suspected, cared about the Count a great deal in other ways.

Perhaps she had loved him.

Jonathan didn't really know how anyone could possibly love the Count. How they could be attracted to him, certainly. Or how they could lose hours and hours abandoning themselves to him completely in every physical sense – yes, he could understand that. But to love that sort of creature? It was incomprehensible to him.

He wanted to ask Mina if she had loved the Count, and why. But when he had trouble even asking her to pass him the salt over dinner, that seemed unlikely.

The time when things were best between the two of them was in bed. But, even then, Mina avoided looking at him, and Jonathan tried not to hear the words formed by her gasps. No doubt she did the same with him.

It wasn't a real marriage anymore, Jonathan was sure about that.

_Version Seven_

The Count terrified him. His castle did as well, the decaying tapestries on the walls, and the moldering books in the library. But it was mostly the Count himself, with his long, sharp, yellowing fingernails and the intent, terrifying look in his eyes.

But Jonathan stayed professional and friendly. He answered the Count's questions, talked to him as long as he wanted him to, didn't even flinch at the Count's reaction to Mina's portrait. Mr. Hawkins had said that this could make his career, and Jonathan wasn't going to disappoint the old man, who had trusted him so much. Neither was he going to disappoint Mina, who had so much faith in Jonathan and his career.

He had nightmares sometimes during his stay there, nightmares of the Count driving a knife into Jonathan's stomach or – in the worse ones – running that same knife slowly over Jonathan's skin, talking softly about ancient torture methods. He brushed the dreams away and focused on clear reality, reliable as earth.

So he didn't expect it when the Count put cold hands on Jonathan's shoulders and thanked him for all his help in a voice that promised nothing but lies. He didn't expect it when sharp teeth pierced his neck and all the stories he'd heard of demons returned to his mind.

The Count told him much in those last moments. He told him about Mr. Singleton's morbid cult, and Arthur Holmwood's illness and need for a cure, and how Jonathan had been sent to Transylvania as an unwitting sacrifice in exchange for the Count's compliance.

He told him about how he would go to Whitby with a ticket bearing Jonathan's name, how he would find Mina, "and say goodbye to her for you," the Count said in Jonathan's mind, and Jonathan could imagine his slow smile, though his fangs were still buried in Jonathan's neck.

Then, as life began to leave Jonathan's body, he felt the Count's cold hands against his skin, taking his clothing from him, and in that brief instant of mental connection, Jonathan understood why.

But, even as he died, it seemed too surreal to believe.


	3. Van Helsing

Van Helsing

**Van Helsing**

_Version One_

Professor Bulwer has taught a long time. Every so often, he takes a few months off, and spares some of his meager savings to go on a trip to some place filled with tales of the supernatural and the unexplained. There, they'll look at him oddly, this elderly man with wild hair and equally wild eyes, but he won't pay them any mind.

Then, he goes home, bringing little but plant clippings and far fetched tales, neither of which are taken seriously by his colleagues, none of whom even bother to hide their laughter. Only a few of his most devoted students continue listening, eyes bright with the visions of the world that Bulwer paints for them, full of secrets both beautiful and terrible.

It fills him with a wonderful exuberance, teaching them all and making known these ideas that he had spent his life studying, but at times he felt guilty for it, for the students' open, curious expression reminded Bulwer of himself long years before, hearing the word _nosferatu _in an anthropology professor's lecture and immediately going to look it up in tomes of Eastern European folklore.

How can he possibly tell those students the other things he's learned since then? How can he describe what it is like to pass through towns and cities like a ghost, being paid no heed by grieving men, women, and children? How can he describe the subtle shifts of the world beneath one's feet, the way the shadows lengthen and the vastness of oceans becomes dizzying, the way one's perspective is so entirely different when the tears in the fabric of reality become clear?

Sometimes, he thinks that he should stop teaching. He is making endless converts to his theories, and if the students truly listen, they will only end up worse in the end. It is immoral, it must be, to do such things knowingly.

But the words beg to be spoken, they leap out from the crumbling pages of his ancient books. Were he not to teach, he would have to wander the streets, gibbering like a madman. And he fears lunatic asylums.

_Version Two_

"Your will is strong," the creature tells him, and he does not know what to say. The Count is everything that he is not – charming where he is awkward, suavely handsome where he is reassuringly plain, dark haired with immortal youth where Abraham's hair has all gone grey long ago. That contrast lends a feeling of inevitability to that moment when they stand facing one another, no weapons but the Count's cruelty and Abraham's faith. Abraham knows, even in the exhilarating terror of that moment, that he will think of it forever as the most important of his life, the time when he looked evil in the face.

It is as though they were forever meant to be enemies.

Abraham would like to assert that he is doing this for the sake of those who the monster might hurt and has hurt already, that he is doing this for poor dead Lucy and poor living Mina, but, upon the thrill of electricity in his veins as he looks into the Count's eyes tells him that there is a lie in that.

For he has always wanted to be a hero, and that is the plain truth of it. He has always wanted a real, true adversary, wicked as any nobleman out of a Gothic romance. That is an unfortunate desire, he has always known, selfish and ridiculous, but what else can he hope to do with all his arcane knowledge? He doesn't want to end up doing nothing but teaching a university, watching bored students write down his every word in preparation for exams. He has always wanted something greater, more important.

The crucifix in his hand, the monster backing down, acknowledging his abilities…that was what Abraham had always wanted.

_Version Three_

He couldn't help but wonder. Jonathan's body newly cooled beside him, the stake sticky with blood. He should have left the place immediately, fled the safety of warm inns hung about with garlic, but he couldn't help sitting there, as though keeping his old friend company. The Count was gone, after all, and his demonic bride dead. There was no danger left remaining in the place.

So he wondered. He wondered what it had been like for Jonathan, what events had led to his horrific demise. He had succeeded in killing the woman, Abraham knew. Had the Count then grabbed him by the neck, bit him, as wild as a serpent, some sort of wild revenge for Jonathan's intrusion upon what was his? Had the Count said anything, or was it merely wordless savagery? Had he stayed with Jonathan while the poor man changed into a demon, or left him there to the spiritual agony of it alone?

Had there been gentleness amid the savagery? Had the Count taught Jonathan how to kill, leaving him there in his abandoned castle like some sort of heir?

Had Jonathan taken on that role, wandering through the garishly decorated hallways, reading the books he had been hired to organize?

How many innocent people's blood did he glut himself upon? Had he felt a twinge of remorse as he killed them, a vague recollection of the morals he used to cherish so greatly?

In the brief moment that he opened his eyes as Abraham plunged the stake into his heart, had he recognized his friend? Had he been furious over the betrayal, or grateful for the harsh mercy?

It was getting dark, Abraham noticed. He should head back to the inn.

_Version Four_

He's taken to the jail, which is empty except for corpses. One of the two policemen still remaining alive stands outside his cell, while the other leaves, perhaps to find someone else to help deal with him, perhaps to go attend to some other, equally pointless duty.

Abraham doesn't know what to feel, the surreality of the present coming down upon him and making him want to laugh for hours. The policemen would surely think him mad then. No matter. The world has become populated by madmen, and perhaps the entire city has turned into nothing but a hallucination.

"Why did you do it?" The policeman asks him, startling him out of his fever-tinged thoughts.

"What?"

"Kill that nobleman. What's the point in killing someone when we're all dying of plague anyway?"

It's a reasonable question, really. It's a shame that Abraham doesn't have a reasonable answer. He half shrugs. "You wouldn't believe me."

The policeman regards him with a tinge more of respect. "Have you gone mad or something?"

Abraham half laughs. "Perhaps." There is a bit of a pause. "I've seen too many plague victims that I can't cure, maybe. It's very depressing, being a doctor in the middle of an incurable epidemic."

The policeman considers that. "How did you know the Count?"

Unbidden, an honest answer comes from his mouth. "I didn't. I knew Lucy Harker, though. And her husband, Jonathan." Speaking of that, where was mad Jonathan? There was no one to care for him now, was there? And Lucy had died mostly for his sake, hadn't she, the brave, good woman…

"I can't see what punishment they'd give you. Dr. Seward can't even manage to keep his lunatics locked up; I don't know what we'll do with our murderers. Probably not worth it, to keep you here. Especially if we're all going to end up dead by plague. Should just let you go and eat your last meal with the rest of them."

Again, Abraham shrugs. "I might even be safer from the disease here. There's less chance of contagion." He pauses. "I would like some water, though, to wash this blood off my hands."

The policeman brings it. Abraham washes his hands carefully, as though traces of blood remaining on his skin could spread the Count's poison into his own veins. As he does so, the policeman outside suddenly gives a terrible sound of coughing, and falls to the floor of the prison. Abraham can't tell whether he's dead yet or not.

He still wants to laugh.

_Version Five_

He wishes that he'd been there in final moments, to hold her in his arms as he did when she was a child, and murmur gentle words in their native tongue. Oh, his Mina, his only child, the only one he had left in all the world. His beloved wife was long since in the madhouse, lost to him – how could he have been so unfortunate as to lose his only child as well, her half a continent away at her death?

But, though he longs to grieve forever and a day, he puts aside the sorrow for a time, when all the facts begin lining up, falling into a pattern he knows all too well (how could he have been so naïve, to treat these cases all over Europe and not foresee the danger to his own child? Why did he not make Mina wear a crucifix since her schooldays, instruct her never to take it off when he put her to bed at night? How could he…but no, the path of thought is too fraught with despair for him to contemplate it). He treats the case as he would treat any other, garlic all over her grave, instructions given to all in Dr. Seward's household. He treats everyone like a potential spy, just as he has done on previous occasions – particularly young, beautiful Lucy Seward, the friend Mina talked of so admiringly. He knows her sort, he has seen them a thousand times before; she is that "new woman", horror of society and joy of libertine vampires, with ambitions greater than her husbands' and wanton dreams.

He will save Lucy if she can be saved, though, as a final gift to Mina, who would have wanted that. Even now, all her sorrow could be easily averted, the monster caught before he claims her, her returned to the loving arms of her fiancée without a scratch on her lovely little throat.

He cannot save Mina. Mina will belong to the whole list of men and women for whom he came too late. It is his worst nightmare, Mina with fangs and a face of ghastly white. He does not know yet if it went that far, if she was infected with the disease or merely killed by its symptoms, but he must face the possibility, even if only in his dreams.

If it is true, he thinks in some deep part of his soul, then he will at least get his asked-for goodbye. He will be able to hold her in his arms and rock her to eternal sleep, as though she were a little child again. He wants that, to his shame, he wants that chance, _deserves _it.

It wouldn't be worth it, of course. It wouldn't be worth hearing her screams he plunged the stake into her dear heart. It wouldn't. That is terrible, that is a perversion of nature.

No. Cannot think about it all. Go through the motions, do what is necessary. Time enough to rest when the dawn comes.

_Version Six_

Whatever else one might say about him, he is honest. He knows the effect that has on those good men and women he helps, but he knows well enough that his candor will be the only thing to stir any of them to action. Men may look at him in shock when he tells them that their wives and daughters have become whores for the devil, but they will bring him to the girls' graves, stake in hand and resolve in heart. And then they will thank him afterwards.

For the powers of evil are too potent to speak about in oblique, modest riddles. They must be met head-on, their vague powers dragged out into the bright, burning sunlight. He has learned that, over the years.

He tried to preserve feelings, in the beginning. He remembers the second victim of the Count's that he treated. That one was a man, and it was that perversion that he avoided speaking of. The man's wife was a frail, pretty thing, looking about to faint every second. "Oh, can you cure him, Professor?" she asked him, little hands twisting together in nervousness, "Can you bring my James back to me?"

He remembers glancing at the man lying on the bed, asleep, breathing shallow and pulse racing, imagining him sinfully coupling with the demon, as he knew he must have, and not being able to bear telling the poor woman of those images. "Of course, my dear!" he told her then, voice hearty and assured, "Ja, but it will be a difficult thing, and yet one not beyond the reaches of our science! Leave his treatment entirely to me, and ask of me no questions, and we shall get on with all ease."

The man died two days later, and his grave was empty before Abraham could get to it. Since then, he has told the brash, garish truth.

He is particularly careful of that this time, for he can tell that there is something different about this incident. It does not fit the Count's careful, diabolical pattern. Lucy's seduction and death did, perhaps, but this business with Madam Mina? Ah, but that is not the way the creature does such things.

He has a theory about that, one that he is not entirely sure of. He thinks that the creature cares about Madam Mina beyond his usual violent lust. And he thinks that Mina cares about him in return.

He tells no one of that theory, though it takes him fighting against all his impulses of honesty of stay silent. He must wait, and watch Madam Mina with all possible care, and then perhaps he shall see. And perhaps she will lead him right into the monster's lair.

_Version Seven_

He has seen such horrors. Sharp fangs, bloody altars, animals and children and healthy young men and women dead, dead, dead. His captivity has been like one long nightmare, from the Count's long nails biting into skin and his breath like death and decay in his face, to this dark basement. It is not something he could have ever imagined as a respectable university professor, teaching of the occult in manners guaranteed to put all students at ease. It has been small things that wrought his ruin; the wrong books purchased, the wrong questions asked to the wrong people. And then the traps were triggered, the monster came out of his lair to silence Abraham forever.

For the first night, he was in the clutches of the Count himself, hissing and snarling at him, his strong, long fingered hands bruising Abraham everywhere as he couldn't help whimpering. And then, a harsh blow to his head knocked him unconscious and he woke in the darkness of a blindfold, wrists and ankles tied, mortal voices all around him.

He was moved from captor to captor after that, on trains, boats, carriages. He did not know how they managed to transport him without attracting notice, and couldn't care. It was a dreamlike indignity that he could never even imagined before, being trapped in a world of darkness and helplessness, gagged except on the rare occasions that he was fed. Day after day, night after night, he wished that he had burned those treacherous books, eradicated all trace of the word vampire or the name Vlad Tepes from his mind.

At last, he was brought to that house in which all the rest of the horrors were contained. He guesses that it was in London, from the language and accents of his captors, but he has never even seen out a window. The men there have been instructed, it seems, to torment him in retaliation for the crime of his knowledge, and they obey completely. His forced to watch their obscene rituals, and sometimes even to participate in them. They make him eat the flesh of their sacrificed victims, sometimes, and laugh when he vomits afterwards.

Eventually, they grow bored with tormenting him. They lock him in their dark basement, placing food and water down there every so often. He sits in the corner and shivers, trying to dream of home, his bed, his books, his eager students.

One day, the door opens. The brightness of the light hurts his eyes.


	4. Mina

**Mina**

_Version One_

It seemed to her that there was a great weight in the world. She felt it sometimes, in her bones, on nights when she would wake in the dark and gaze up at the blankness of the ceiling above her, or days that she'd spend on the beach, in the all too vivid brightness of the noonday sun, hardly able to rouse herself to stand, as though someone had hollowed out her bones and filled them with molten lead.

On those days, Hutter would bound along, eager as a loyal dog, and she wondered how she could ever manage to follow him, on that afternoon or through all their lives. She pictured years and years of him darting ahead and her lagging behind, until eventually he stopped even bothering to look for her behind him.

He seemed entirely a different creature from her, and she felt guilty that she was marrying him, as though her presence at his side would become a weight like her own, slowing those bounds down to a dejected crawl. But how was it that he didn't feel the weight, when it was so vivid to her? The sun was so bright that it blotted out her vision of him, and she felt a headache beginning, burning in some deep place in her skull. When she told Hutter this, he put his arm around her shoulders and led her back home, slowing his pace for her sake. And they got home quickly, where he poured out for her slick liquids prescribed by doctors for her headaches and sleepwalking, slippery down her throat.

She reached out and touched his face, his hair, so warm and human while she sometimes felt so cold. He was leaving soon, he was going to a dark place shaded with the threatening boughs of dark leafed trees, a place where the soil would smell rich with death. She knew this, from feeling with her fingers the erratic characters of the letter Knock had given him to deliver. "It's in this fellow's native language, I suppose," he had said when he showed her the letter, "I don't know what that would be; I'm not a linguist." She was not either, and in fact knew no language but her own, but sometimes she felt she could taste them, and this tasted like Latin but more bitter, centuries of loneliness distilled into a few paragraphs of cryptic writing.

It made her afraid, for the letter weighed more to her pale hands than all her lead-filled bones, and it made her feel as though this old castle to which Hutter was going would crumble on top of him, ancient bricks crushing him with the weight he had never before had to feel.

And so, her headache dissipating, she held him close, listening to his heartbeat.

_Version Two_

She had always loved going to the ballet. The softness of the velvet seats, the thrill of importance that came from having one's own box, the glittering spectacle of the dancers, fluttering like exotic birds in the stiff tulle of their costumes. It was even better when it was John who took her, for he put his arm over her shoulder when the designated chaperone (normally Doctor Seward) wasn't looking, and he whispered in her ear during the boring parts.

This night had been particularly wonderful, for she felt that she and Lucy glittered as much as any of the dancers, their newly bobbed hair bright under the gaslights, Mina's teeth white and straight as she laughed at John's jokes.

And then there had been the Romanian nobleman (John had accidentally called him Hungarian later, but she remembered quite well – he was Romanian). True, she hadn't been so fond of him as Lucy (who didn't have a beau like John, the poor girl, and so could hardly be blamed for fancying every well dressed man who smiled at her, even if the smile did gleam as fake as Count Dracula's had), but he had been pleasant, interesting company. Sometimes she did grow so tired of the same people, from the same places, day in and day out. John didn't understand that, she knew that – he was a good, well meaning, perfectly lovely man, but he had no sense of all the things that lay out there in the world, so far outside the borders of England. He had the potential to be such a _fascinating _man, she was certain of that, but the shell of practical, middle-class solidity around him had to be cracked first.

In any case – Count Dracula. He wasn't the kind of person that, for instance, she'd want as a beau (and, if she was to tell the truth, she didn't think he was the sort of man who'd go beyond a few flirtations with poor Lucy), but she was sure that he would be wonderful to talk to, and she was very glad that she would be seeing him again.

She hoped that John would get a chance to talk to him as well – perhaps he could pick up some of his aristocratic, continental bearing.

_Version Three_

Mina had always wanted to be a mother. She had no idea why she wasn't – she and Arthur had been married enough years for most women to have two or three, and God knew that they had tried hard enough. But, somehow, she had never conceived, and she would sometimes hold her hand over her stomach at night, imagining it rounding.

She hadn't lost herself in vague imaginings of what could have been, however. Lucy often felt more like a daughter than a sister to her, and ever since she married Arthur she had taken care of her like the mother who Lucy had never had (the woman had died giving birth of Lucy, leaving the girl to grow up in a house of grieving men, and who knew how she had managed to grow up so bright and rosy despite that beginning). She had braided Lucy's hair, teaching her hands to be gentle with it in ways she never was gentle with her own. She had helped Lucy with her schoolwork, explaining the sums in the soothing voice she had always imagined using with a child of her own blood.

And, since Lucy's illness began, she had been the one to take care of her most of the time, while Arthur was at work. She had made sure that Lucy ate, and took her on walks in the garden, and did everything else that the doctor ordered. It was her hand on Lucy's forehead that checked for fever, and when Lucy was in the painful grips of it, she called out for Arthur and Mina, just like any other child would for their parents.

Tania was a slightly different matter.

Tania had been born about two years after Mina married Arthur, and, at the time, it was a burden for Mina to watch the little girl mewling at her mother's breast, her little hands curling and uncurling. But, eventually, while Tania's mother was busy with her duties in the household, Mina took to caring for the child, playing with her and teaching her rhymes. Sometimes, on dreamy afternoons, Mina would imagine that Tania's hair was the color of Arthur's and the thickness of Mina's, and when the girl ran crying to Mina with her childhood griefs nearly as much as she did to her mother, it was not difficult to get lost in the fantasy.

The world was flipped upside down now, though. Lucy was in her grave, and Mina felt the painful wrongness of that as much as any mother who had to bury her child. Tania was shaken and fragile, always clutching the rosary that Doctor Van Helsing gave to her, and Mina felt hurt when the girl only shook her head to Mina's questions about what had happened to her. And Arthur's eyes were painfully distant, and though she put that down to his grief from Lucy's death, there was something about that which didn't seem quite true. She felt painfully inadequate as both make-believe mother and real wife, and there was nothing she could do about it.

It was with that thought, as she sat alone in the parlor, her pretty dress and carefully put up hair doing no good to anyone at all, that the message from Arthur came.

_Version Four_

Her strength did not come from religion, and she counted that lucky in those bleak days. If her strength came from religion, then it would have taken a great effort of mind and will to convince herself that all these sorrows – Jonathan's illness, Mina's death, the existence of this fiend, the great, terrible plague that was filling the streets and canals of the city with bloated bodies – were the will of an ever benevolent God. That effort could have faltered, and led to doubts, leading, as doubts do, to indecision, to the hesitation that could have led to the death of nations.

No, her strength did not come from that, for all that the metal of her crucifix was worn with the compulsive rubbings of her fingers, for all that she prayed at night, old remembered words in Latin, and was sure that there was one who heard her. But her God was far from her, not as near as the figure on the crucifix, and she blamed neither him nor the devil for the troubles which afflicted her. No, she could not, for she had seen the agent of all these sorrows, and did not imagine him an apparition, for she had heard the rasp of his breathing, too distinct for anything but a being as close to humanity as those ratlike fangs could let him be.

No, her strength came from tangible things she could touch, and hear, and smell, and taste. Her strength came from the butter-yellow idylls of her days with Jonathan before his trip, the intricate patterns of his hands, the pale wood of the little house he had bought for her, his arms around her as she awoke from a nightmare.

(They hadn't had sex often, because for them it was a careful undertaking, each button and lace undone with deliberate care. He touched her gently, for her pale skin bruised easily, and he had been too wildly eager on their wedding night, and had wept the next morning to see the dark marks of his pleasure on her skin. For a dozen unarticulated reasons, they had never gotten one bed large enough for the two of them, but managed in the narrow confines of hers or his whenever they did sleep together.)

Her strength came from the cleanness of sand, and moss covered gravestones, and the warm fur of her kittens. The world crumbled around her and she stood still and straight in her white dress and her dark cloak, tactile memories like a wordless litany in her mind.

The Count not truly feel, she knew that. His long nailed nails could not touch without hurting, the bright pleasures of the human world would cause him to cringe away, murmuring in pain. If her compassion had been stronger than her courage, she could have gone to him as he asked, to cut his nails and teach him how to stroke a cat's fur gently. But Jonathan was in danger, his pallor and the dark circles around his eyes increasing with every night, and the clean white streets she loved were being filled with refuse and rotten vegetables, the unmarked bodies mingled with everything else. And she suspected that he was too far gone to be taught.

And so she gave him the only thing he could feel, which would do his soul no good whatsoever, and, as she lay in helpless stillness, his breathing began to sound to her like the rhythm of the waves.

_Version Five_

It was odd, perhaps, that she had lived so long adjacent to it, and had spent so much time helping the patients there, but she had never been inside a cell at Carfax Asylum. Her father had never thought it proper. And though she had laughed at his old fashioned worries, and insisted that, if she knew so many of the patients so well, there could be no harm in seeing where they slept, she had obeyed. And so the multitude of locked doors had been to her impenetrable fortresses, as sealed to her sight as the minds of the inmates, filled with terrible mysteries beyond her comprehension.

Odd, then, to be locked in one, so odd that she nearly laughed at the irony of it. There was no mystery in this place, she realized as she looked around – there was no room for mystery in the stale air. She knew suddenly, with the burn of certainty, that there were more mysteries concealed in her own thin frame then in every padded cell of the asylum. But the locked door contained the mysteries, stopped them up like an overflowing bottle, and she thought that perhaps that was what all the rooms of the asylum did – stopped up the vivid mysteries in the minds of their madmen, till they screamed wordless screams that the walls reverberated back at them.

But they hadn't reckoned on one thing, her father and Professor Van Helsing and dear, dear Jonathan – they had put their fears in the explosion of her mysteries, her bare feet running across the dew-damp grass in the dark, towards the shadowy form of the castle which represented the greatest mystery of all. She could see broken window bars in her mind's eye, twisted into uselessness, and she knew that mist could get in anywhere, could makes its way into the asylum as surely as his blood had infiltrated hers. The Count was made of mysteries, so thick with them that the solid realities of the world crumbled at his careful, well chosen words.

Yes, he would come soon to take her away, the dark fabric of his cloak enveloping her, and though the air outside would be cold, she would be able to breathe it better than that of the asylum. Better his dark, quiet violence than the bright hypocrisy of those who could slit Mina (poor, dear Mina)'s chest open with a scalpel and lift out her heart, apathetic and calm, even Van Helsing, who called himself her father. With her heart in their hands, surely those men had thought that there were no more deadly mysteries in her, that they had killed them, just like crushing a fly. They had thought they could suffocate Lucy's by locking her up there, she knew that, and perhaps they could have, with enough time, but there wasn't going to be that much time.

_Version Six_

Everything had begun to feel slick and slippery to her, as though she couldn't quite grab hold of it. The glass of absinthe felt as though it was going to drop – she imagined it shattering, dozens of icy pieces of glass everywhere, like stars – slip from the tips of her fingers as he kept pouring for her, glass after glass after glass. Had she eaten, or had she just been drinking absinthe this whole time, licorice against her tongue like a whole meal? She felt that she ought to be nervous, worried about the impropriety of this whole thing, but the world was so hazy, green mist before her eyes, and she felt safe.

The red silk dress he had given her was like water against her skin (for he had given it to her after she had already drunk one glass, and it had seemed completely reasonable to, right before his understanding eyes, strip out of her best clothes and put the dress on over bare skin), the polished wood of the table as smooth as glass. And he was the slipperiest thing of all, his words like snakes, his hands covered with scales. She put her hands against his chest, and the thick patterns of embroidery felt smooth. She reached up to touch his hair, down and flowing about his shoulders, and it felt heavy and glossy in her hands.

Even inside her mind, where everything normally felt like well pressed linen, things with slipping away from her, being replaced by new memories, that did not belong to her, that felt implanted there by the absinthe and her Prince's dark eyes. Rivers that she had never before seen flowed through her mind, and surrounded her, filling her lungs with water until she could not breathe. Heavy, unfamiliar garments encased her like a shroud; her hands touched the ridges of garish red armor the likes of which she had only seen in history books.

She felt her voice, halting, telling the old, sad story, the words darting away from her before she had the time to draw them back, before she had the chance to call out that, no, these were not her memories, this was not her, it was all a lie. No time to speak her own thoughts, the absinthe making her tongue slow and heavy as she was kissed by his lips, slick and unfamiliar, not those of a beloved husband thought dead.

_Version Seven_

His hands were cold. She had noticed that before, noticed that at the café when he had caught her hand in his, promising comfort in a voice that could not but lie. It seemed a more terrible fact now, as those elegant, long fingered hands caught her face between them, stroking her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her eyelids, as though devouring the sensations of her skin. It seemed unendurable, the chill of those hands, especially when it felt certain that she would be feeling them forever, whether in the eternal terror of that very moment in the dark cellar, or in a thousand indistinguishable moments, lying in the dust beside him with his hands searching her skin, indefatigable, unassuagable.

Those sharp teeth hadn't entered her skin yet, but she could taste glimpses of his memory, cold as his hands – Jonathan's blood, Lucy's blood, Jonathan's body lying dead on the cruel stone, Lucy's writhing under the touch of invisible, icy hands. The fear and sorrow tasted in her mouth like iron, like the most vivid sensation she had ever felt, and she began to cry, her tears feeling burning in contrast to the cold of his hands, which still moved over her face, touching her tears as though marveling at the human capacity for sorrow.

The awareness of Jack, and Arthur somewhere near was gone – there was nothing but him and her and the fear, like adrenaline, in her veins, fear of possibilities which couldn't have even begun to articulate, so cold and shadowy were they, yet vivid as red blood. She found herself thinking of the buttons on her blouse, and how easy they would be to unfasten, and she cried more, thinking of Jonathan's uncertain caresses, and his smile, and the brown curls of his hair.

But Count Dracula's cold hands were too vivid for her to think of Jonathan's warmth for long, and the terror began to overcome the horror, until she was shivering, in a way that felt nearly violent, and she could see his fangs, by which Lucy died, and Jonathan, and his hands were on her neck, still so cold, and she was afraid, she was afraid, she was afraid in a way which made her terror in the alleyway of the previous night but a vague foreshadowing, for then she did not know how long the terror could last, centuries and centuries and centuries of dust and moldering fabric and his hands, staying the same through it all, and she felt herself becoming resigned, though somehow that did not dissipate the terror, and the cold must surely kill her, and –

A voice came, from the other side of the room, and the moment was over.


End file.
